by J. Bryan
They jogged down along the steep road with everyone else, and Jenny felt a weight lift from her. They were free, they were alive, the baby was safe.
Then screams sounded from ahead. Pedestrians raced to clear the road as the trucks came back, led by the personnel carriers, which swerved hard toward Jenny, Seth, and Esmeralda and slammed to a halt in front of them. Armored men in biohazard masks poured out of the vehicles, armed with assault rifles. One of them ignited a flamethrower, while two aimed grenade launchers them.
“We got enough firepower to turn you all into grease and smoke,” Ward said. He led the men, dressed in full biohazard armor like the rest, grinning inside his face shield. Jenny recognized his two assistants Buchanan and Avery, who flanked him, carrying assault rifles. “Don’t try a thing. Especially you, Jenny,” Ward instructed.
Jenny felt frozen. The men were all sealed up, protected from her by technology designed specifically to shield them from her power. She looked at Seth, frightened, her mind moving fast, searching the memories of hundreds of lives for anything that might help her.
She remembered what Dr. Heather Reynard of the CDC had found, what Alise and even Kranzler himself had told her. The pox was not biological or chemical. It defied any known laws of physics. It was supernatural, made of the spiritual dark matter of her undying soul.
Who had ever said that gas masks, armor, or the latest biohazard-resistant plastics were any protection against the supernatural? Maybe there was a chance she could summon something aggressive enough to chew right through. Maybe her own beliefs had placed artificial limits on her powers.
“Everybody on your knees,” Ward instructed. Jenny knelt slowly, placing her hands behind her head. Seth and Esmeralda wisely knelt behind her.
She closed her eyes and imagined the pox, which she’d always seen as a swarm of tiny black flies infesting her body, crawling through her stomach and veins, waiting to strike at any living thing. She imagined the flies dividing themselves into smaller flies, which divided themselves again, becoming a much larger swarm of much smaller pox.
She took it as far as she could imagine, seeing them become microscopically small, then smaller than an atom, able to pass through any kind of matter at all. The pox had a strange charge to it, a speed and energy she’d never felt before.
Jenny opened her eyes, locked her gaze on Ward’s mask, and breathed out a black plume that felt like ultra-fine silk as it flowed from her mouth. The river of liquid black punched through the center of Ward’s armor, straight into his heart, then swarmed out along his limbs and up his face, turning momentarily into a teeming black mass with Ward’s features.
Her consciousness was in the pox, just as it had been when she’d died last time. She coursed through him, ripping his flesh to threads and rotting his bones. Ward’s body sagged to the ground, his liquified remains flowing out through the gaping hole in his chest armor, his mask brimming with dark fluid where his head had been.
Ward’s two assistants raised their assault rifles toward Jenny, and she reached the swarm of pox out in each direction, burrowing through their masks and into their skulls, instantly transforming their faces into unrecognizable clumps of ulcerated tumors.
Most of the Hale Security men, seeing that their armor was no protection, broke and ran to save their own lives. A couple of them remained and tried to shoot her, and Jenny ripped through them, leaving them with decayed remnants of flesh clinging to their bones. She had an incredibly precise control over the pox, as though every spore in the swarm responded directly to her mind, something she’d never felt before.
She realized her entire mind had transferred over to the swarm. Her body had fallen to the ground, vacant of any soul, and Seth had run over. He was trying to heal her with his touch, while Esmeralda was repeatedly calling her name.
In her strange state, in the gray area between life and death, she perceived something that, clearly, none of the others saw. From Ward’s body, a great, dark mass boiled upwards like the smoke from a burning city, blotting out the stars above. Within the gigantic shape, she saw wriggling, squirming movement, like hundreds of tentacles covered in large, unblinking eyes, each tentacle tipped with a long, sharp beak for prying and digging. Her ancient enemy, the seer, most recently incarnated as Kranzler and then as Ward.
The seer moved sluggishly, still disoriented from his recent sudden death. If she moved quickly, she thought, she might be able to finish her attack.
She poured her amorphous swarm-shape into him, chewing into him in thousands of places at once, ripping apart the fabric of the exotic dark matter from which he had formed, destroying one of the last fragments of the primordial chaos. She ripped him limb by limb by limb, scattering chunks of him all across the sky, like some ancient god carved to pieces and hurled into the depths above to form a constellation. The torn fragments of him were so dark to her that the night sky beyond it was a bright gloom by contrast.
She ate into the core of him, concentrating herself into a denser swarm and surrounding what remained of him. She felt the turbulence of his pain and surprise, and a final pulse of anger so intense it seemed to burn the sky from horizon to horizon.
Then he was gone, countless little threads of dissolving energy scattered as far as she could see. She had destroyed him down to the root. The seer would not be back for them, in this lifetime or any other.
She gathered herself together and turned her attention back to Seth and Esmeralda, still kneeling over Jenny’s fallen form, Seth still trying to revive her with his power. They were safe now—the baby was safe. Ward was dead, his project erupting in flames behind them. She watched the dark, hot smoke pour from the ventilation shafts inside the walls. The mountain rumbled as the entire yard collapsed, fire and embers shooting out through the vents, as if the endurance of the structure below had somehow been connected to the seer’s soul. Or maybe the burning helicopter fuel had simply weakened some essential structure, leading to the collapse of the underground base, leaving only a smoking, rubble-filled crater behind. She would never know. She only knew that Seth and her baby were safe.
She considered it best to leave her body where it lay. The doctors had determined that the baby, Miriam, had no immunity to the pox at all. None. As long as Jenny lived, she would be the greatest threat to her daughter’s young life. Stepping aside, not returning to her body, staying dead...that was the only way to keep the baby safe from her.
With all of their kind currently dead, except for Seth and Esmeralda, the girl would not need the protection of her mother’s deadly powers...only protection from them. Jenny’s death would be the ultimate act of self-sacrifice for the good of her child.
She pulled herself up and back, letting the world of the living grow dim and distant, as it did when she was between incarnations. She would rest, and she would wait.
There was one problem—it felt like a single, hair-thin thread, but stronger than steel or diamond, holding her to the earthly plane. Miriam, her little girl. She could hear Miriam crying. A part of her refused to leave the baby.
She let herself be drawn back toward the living for a moment. She looked into the baby’s face, currently gazing in awe at Seth’s chin. She looked at her own pale, lifeless body.
An insight arose in her, the result of a few lifetimes of struggling to hurt no one, as well as her intense desire to return to the only child she’d ever had in any of her lives.
Before, when moving into a developing human body still in the womb, she had spread her swarm-like soul through every cell in the body. She began to wonder now whether that was necessary. Perhaps she concentrate herself into a very small shape, hidden deep inside the core of her body until she needed the pox. It would leave her dangerously vulnerable to being attacked by others...but it would also free her to touch other living things without harming them, her deepest wish for several lifetimes now.
The plague-bringer focused herself, drawing herself inward until she was a tiny, extremely dense mass of energy. S
he floated down toward the unconscious body below, and she landed on Jenny Morton’s heart like a black snowflake. With a thought, she made her heart start beating again.
Jenny opened her eyes and took in a delicious breath of cool mountain air. She smiled up at Seth and the baby, feeling more at peace than she’d ever been.
Chapter Forty-Nine
In June of 1934, Jonathan Seth Barrett sat in his office in his Fallen Oak house, surrounded by the heads of of great beasts he’d killed, the African lion, the American buffalo. He stared at the telegram on his desk. Much had changed in the past year, not least the final death of Prohibition, which was why he now drank bourbon inside of Appalachian white lightning or whichever bottles of questionable, no-label rum happened to get smuggled up from the Bahamas.
Outside, the sun was white-hot, hot enough to broil shrimp on the roof. The high, narrow windows of his office were open, bringing the searing light into his study. His new electric fans churned the air but didn’t do much in the way of actually cooling the house. Only a stiff, cool breeze and a little cloud cover would accomplish that.
He struck a match printed with the name of one of his favorite speakeasies in Charleston—not a speakeasy anymore, he reminded himself, just a plain old nightclub. The world was changing, and he felt like all the adventure was draining out of it. He lit a cigar, tossing the match into the rhinoceros-foot ashtray he’d bought on his trip to Egypt years ago.
The telegram from Berlin didn’t say much, only vaguely stating that the project and all involved with it had been terminated, with a hint that further inquiries were not welcome. Many of Barrett’s long-time correspondents in the eugenics community were dropping contact as they drew behind the dark veil of Nazi secrecy. He didn’t give a holy damn. For all the money he’d donated, none of those scientists had figured out a single thing useful to him. Barrett had concluded that the eugenics folks really had no idea what the hell they were talking about.
He poured himself another tall glass of bourbon. He could read between the lines. He hadn’t needed the telegram, anyway. He’d felt it in the spring, like an earthquake shaking him from the other side of the world. Juliana was dead. The telegram, in its small way, was only a confirmation of what he knew deep inside.
He knew it because he’d begun to feel hopeless. Knowing she was in the world had expanded him, making him larger than he was, freeing him to dream bigger than he ever had before. He’d left her there out of anger, because she’d chosen the other one, the pretty blue-eyed boy with the healing touch. Her rejection had hurt him far more than he’d let on. He’d been certain that she shared his feelings, that they were truly meant for each other.
He’d assumed they would cross paths again, that fate would bring them together, but he’d been terribly, absolutely wrong. She was gone, and the world felt like a much smaller place without her.
From then on, Barrett would age much faster, and he would shrink into a bitter, hollow man with a heart like broken rock. His ambition retreated. He would settle into being a manager of his past investments, abandoning his run at becoming a global titan.
He wandered out onto his sprawling back porch, looking up at the high brick wall of the necropolis he’d built for his family, a monumental place to bury himself and his descendants. He would rot and die here, watching his wife retreat into opiate addiction until the day he buried her, watching his son cringe and tremble, never emerging from his shadow.
His son would manage to marry, though, and have another son of his own, named Jonathan Seth Barrett III, as Barrett would insist. In that direction, at least, lay some hope for his legacy.
Chapter Fifty
JONATHAN SETH BARRETT XVI, read the inscription on the monument. Seth’s great-grandfather, the egomaniac he knew more recently by the name Alexander, had planned for at least sixteen generations to be named after him, one more than the Ptolemy dynasty that had ruled over the final centuries of ancient Egypt’s decline.
Seth pulled the goggles down over his eyes, fitted the sharp end of the chisel into the letter J, and swung the hammer. The chisel bit the stone, rendering the letter illegible. He only had to chisel out every single letter of his name from the hard, dark granite, and he only had to do that sixteen times. It was a hot, humid summer afternoon in Fallen Oak, the sunlight bleach-white all around him, and he was already sweating.
He struck out the next letter, and the next. It sometimes took a few swings of the hammer to fully scratch out a single letter.
His great-grandfather had built this necropolis in his backyard out of an obsession with legacy. It was an obsession that had led him, five thousand years earlier, to order the construction of the first large pyramid in Egypt to serve as his tomb, when he had ruled as the pharaoh Djoser and used his undead minions to conquer the Sinai Peninsula and mine its minerals.
Seth finished chiseling out the name from the sixteenth row of monuments, then moved up a row to chisel out JONATHAN SETH BARRETT XV. It was going to be a long day.
The dead-raiser had transformed the Barrett family into a pharaoh-style death cult, using threats to make them uphold the memory of their malignant ancestor. He had terrified his son and grandson—Seth’s grandfather and father, respectively—by demonstrating his power to raise the dead, then threatening to haunt them from beyond the grave if his wishes were not obeyed.
Wish number one: the firstborn son of each generation had to be named after him. Seth was the fourth, and he was going to be the last. If Seth ever had a son, he would name him anything but “Jonathan Seth.”
Seth chiseled out row after row of names, his muscles starting to ache and his shirt plastered to him with sweat. He didn’t know what he would say if the police came to investigate the hours of banging and chiseling, but he wasn’t entirely sure whether Fallen Oak even had a police department anymore. The little downtown was overgrown already, the town square thick with weeds and wildflowers. Between the still-unexplained disappearance and rumored death of so many people, and the closing of Mayor Winder’s timber plant, the town was drying up fast.
He smirked as he remembered Barrett’s grandiose plans for his model town, proudly explaining the importance of Fallen Oak’s position on the local roadways and the rail and telegraph lines, clueless that the interstates, telephone, and eventually the internet would make every advantage obsolete. It was sad to see the empty shells that remained, but he’d fulfilled his promise to Barrett. The man’s vast, dark Charleston-style mansion was reduced to a charred stump. His most recent incarnation, Alexander, had been killed by Seth’s power. Seth himself had pretty well ruined the Barrett name in town, to the point that they’d tried to lynch him along with Jenny. Seth himself would eventually inherit Barrett’s entire fortune.
Today, he struck the final blows, punishing the dead-raiser in a way that would matter to him, erasing his name from history, the same method used by ancient priests to destroy the ghost of a horrible king.
Seth reached his own name, smiling as he chiseled it away. He paused to touch his brother’s name. CARTER MAYFIELD BARRETT. He left that one in place.
He moved back a row and chiseled away his father’s name, and his mother’s for good measure. There was no reason for them to be buried here in Fallen Oak, he thought. They should be buried in Florida, where they’d lived happily with their boat and their sunlight and rum.
He chiseled out his grandfather’s name, feeling satisfied. He knew that his grandfather had suffered from mental problems, from severe paranoia, especially late in life, obsessed with the idea that Barrett’s ghost was hounding him. He’d even built a very modest house on the grounds, far from the main house, and lived there much of his life. It had fallen into disrepair since his death.
Finally, Seth faced the large central monolith towering above the others, the burial place of the first Jonathan Seth Barrett. He placed the chisel in the center of the dead man’s name.
“I win,” he whispered, and then he swung the hammer.
Ch
apter Fifty-One
The hilly woods behind the Morton house in Fallen Oak were soaked in cool, green sunlight falling from the lush summer canopy overhead. Jenny walked the overgrown path with the baby cradled in her arms. Tiny Miriam gazed around at trees and boulders with huge, fascinated eyes.
Rocky loped along the trail beside Jenny, swishing his big blue-mottled tail. In her absence, Rocky had overcome his skittish ways to become the sort of dog who lay snoring under the kitchen table most of the day. He’d been excited to see her, jumping up to lick her hands and face. He certainly didn’t live in fear of people anymore.
The baby started crying, for the thousandth time that day, as Jenny pushed through thick, mossy growth and into a tiny meadow. She gazed at the cairn of stones that marked her mother’s grave. Small, bright wildflowers sprouted through the rocks.
“Hi, momma,” Jenny said. The baby cried louder. Jenny sat on a low, heavy oak limb and touched the baby’s face, whispering to her, and the baby settled. It was strange to Jenny, touching someone in a way that comforted instead of killed.
“I thought you’d want to see her,” Jenny said. “I named her after you. She’s so pretty, isn’t she? I think she looks like you.” Jenny bit her lip, listening to a red-winged blackbird singing in the tree above her. It was a sound that always made her think of long, blissfully slow summer afternoons.
“I don’t know if you can hear me,” Jenny said to her mother, “But I think maybe you can. If things as wicked as me live on and on, life after life, after all the evil things I’ve done...I think people must live on, too, somewhere. I don’t know if you come back here or not, getting born again. Maybe you do. If I keep going after death, then you must, too.